Lance Charnes

Willie Sutton famously said (or, perhaps, didn’t say) that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. But that’s not the only place the money is. It’s in casinos too (thus, the Ocean’s [insert number] films). It’s sometimes in mobsters’ homes (the focus of Widows, for instance). But if you’re going to commit possibly…

It has to happen to every brilliant, troubled detective at some point in a career of hunting down fiendishly clever serial killers: one too many peeks into the abyss prompts him (sometimes her) to chuck the big crimes in the big city and move to a remote town where the crimes are small and life…

At some point, a disturbing notion has to cross the mind of anyone who’s been assigned a bodyguard: who protects me from my protector? If that bodyguard decides he doesn’t like what he learns about his charge, it’s inevitable that he’ll ask himself, why should I protect this person? These questions and more underlie Bodyguard,…

A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any…

In The Fallen Architect by Charles Belfoure, architect Douglas Layton finds himself digging up the past to clear his name. It’s hard to say that architects are overrepresented among mystery/thriller protagonists. Dick Francis wrote at least one novel (Decider) with an architect detective; the unseen antagonist of JP Delaney’s domestic thriller The Girl Before is…

Ghost: My Thirty Years as an FBI Undercover Agent by Michael McGowan & Ralph Pezzullo is the explosive memoir of an FBI field operative who has worked more undercover cases than anyone in history. The career-end autobiography seems to come in two flavors. The vanilla version is from the person who truly, intensely believes in the…

Despite its utter failure to provide stability for the German people between the wars, the late Weimar Republic has been fabulously successful in another regard: providing the perfect morally dubious backdrop for generations of spy, political, and crime thrillers. If noir ever lived anywhere, it was in Weimar Berlin—amidst political and economic upheaval, social unrest,…

The Israeli-Palestinian blood feud has been around for so long, it’s become part of the world’s wallpaper. It rarely escapes the inside pages of newspaper front sections unless the scale of the bloodletting becomes especially heinous. At least here in America, the narrative has been frozen in stone since the 1967 war: doughty Israelis fighting…

Leonardo Padura is Cuba’s best-known author—though anyone other than a specialist would struggle to name another Cuban writer—and a winner of the Princess of Asturias Award, the Spanish-speaking world’s Nobel Prize for Literature. But up here in El Norte, we know him mostly for four detective novels he wrote in the 1990s featuring Lieutenant Mario…

The spectrum of “bad behavior” stretches all the way from kicking puppies to genocide. How despicable can the central character of a movie or TV show be before you can’t watch it anymore? Can they be a pimp? A murderer? Serial killer? (Previously on Dexter…) A cannibal? (Hannibal Lecter, come on down!) How about this:…